


pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, M/M, Post Series, Season/Series 04, Sensory Deprivation, will be a fusion eventually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 10:06:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toby thinks that the fact that they only have sex when they are too exhausted to deal with the consequences probably says all that needs saying about their relationship. Or, some post-State of the Union encounters and the consequences that came along for the ride.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

**Author's Note:**

> For kink_bingo round 6 (2013). Kink was 'sensory deprivation'.

"and we shared a bed in which I could not sleep at all"  
— 'Crooked Teeth', Death Cab for Cutie

"ghosts and clouds and nameless things, squint your eyes and hope real hard, maybe sprout wings"  
— 'Maybe Sprout Wings', The Mountain Goats

"now my heart is full and I just can't explain, so I won't even try to"  
— 'Now My Heart Is Full', Morrissey

 

*

 

They never left the bar. In his mind they never leave the bar. Eventually they will have to leave the bar, but time has begun to bend and it's all gotten very Godot, the two of them in shirt sleeves and bow ties waiting for the bar to close, which it never does, and never will. 

*

“Did you ever think about doing this? Before?” Toby asks, when he has enough beer in his system. 

“You mean did I think about quitting because I couldn’t cope with my irrepressible love for you?”

Toby sighs. “Do you have to be like this?”

“You like me like this.”

“You know, I really can assure you that I don’t.”

Sam smiles. “I thought about it.”

“Bar’s closing up in a few minutes, fellas.”

“Thus spake the big guy,” Toby says, not really under his breath.

“So maybe you’d want to settle your tab,” the big guy suggests.

Sam flashes him the kind of smile they are all hoping will win him a hopeless election and takes two twenties out of his wallet.

“Nice place,” he says, as he pulls on Toby’s arm and makes for the door. “I suppose I can count on your vote in the election next week?”

“Didn’t vote for your guy the first time —“

“And you don’t plan to the second time,” Toby says, getting up, “Yeah, I’ve heard this one before. Thanks for the beers.”

They walk the few blocks back to the hotel, past California’s international class beachfront. Sam has the requisite hotel room, since he refuses to stay with his father (another thing which is sure to poll really well), well away from the encampment of the Bartlet White House (because he has more money than they do and can afford better hotels). Nothing is ever quiet in California, and that is one of the things he resents about it, despite the undeniable similarity to New York. The quality of the Californian unsilence is different — youthful in a way that makes him feel old, reverberating off the ocean instead of tall glass buildings where people he despises earn more money in a week than he does in a year. Exuberance? Sam would suggest, if Toby were capable of articulating anything right now other than the desire for more alcohol. / Yes, exuberance, with all the connotations thereof: carelessness, openness, and— Happiness? he would say. Yes. Maybe it’s all the repellent happiness. / I thought that was it.

When they get back to his hotel room, Sam begins it all again, and Toby lets him. It’s the last time, after all.

*

So close your eyes.

Sam — 

If you keep your eyes closed, you won’t have to see this.

What makes you —

After all, you’re getting married again soon.

I’m amused by your conviction of a fait accompli.

Sam kisses him, while trying to smile in that particular way he has when he’s trying to look like a big boy, no tears, no mess.

I won’t be holding my breath. But I will be checking my mail for the invitation.

Yeah.

So close your eyes.

Sam —

I can use the bow tie, you know.

I’m sure you could.

But I know that you would just find that embarrassing and off-putting, so why don’t you just keep your eyes closed like I’ve been asking?

Got this all planned out, huh?

He smiles again. Yeah, I’ve had so much free time to think this all through.

You can multitask, I’ve seen you do it.

Not this week.

Afraid of what you might say in front of the tycoons?

Well, I’m doing so great already, I thought maybe a gay affair with my boss would be just what I needed.

Then I’ll be sure to stand out of your eye line tomorrow.

And I’ll appreciate that.

Like this?

I can see you’ve closed your eyes before.

Shut up, Sam.

Do you think you can keep them closed?

I believe I am up to that challenge.

Whatever I do? Hey — you’re meant to keep them closed.

Unless you’ve been practising, and I’m sure you haven’t, I think I can contain myself.

I’m actually concerned that you’ll fall asleep.

No, Sam.

You know what?

What?

That’s the second time you’ve smiled at me like that in as many hours. I’m starting to worry.

Like what?

Just close your eyes.

*

Sam is bathing his right hand in a tupperware box filled with ice and water in the middle of a Washington January when his boss chooses to make his appearance. In fact Toby has been sneaking looks at him through the office window for the last few hours, just for as long as the need to look at something other than his computer screen has been stronger than the need to make new words appear on it. He has noted the ice and the tupperware and has thought about asking whether whiskey and opiates would not be a better solution (faster acting, at any rate) but cannot make the sentence arrive satisfactorily in his head. Syntax, he thinks, is always the first thing to go.

Instead he just stands in the doorway, and flicks his eyes from Sam to Sam’s rapidly whitening hand.

"It's a valid thing to do, Toby, okay? I looked it up on WebMD and everything."

Toby stands in the doorway and frowns.

“Okay.”

“It reduces swelling and, yanno, when I get the feeling back in it, probably means I’ll still be able to hold a pen tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“You know that there’s still pie in the mini-fridge, right?”

Toby frowns at him again, then seems to make an effort to lighten his face. “Yeah. Cherry.”

“Of course. I’ll come eat some with you in a minute, I just need to finish giving myself frostbite.”

“Okay.”

“Authors do this after mass signings. It’s recommended.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Sam says, taking his hand out of the ice bath and reaching for the towel on the corner chair, “You haven’t said anything even remotely sarcastic during this conversation and you’ve had plenty of opportunities.”

“This worries you?”

“I worry that you store the sarcasm up if you don’t let it out regularly. And I’m the nearest warm body.”

“Why aren’t you typing?”

“Huh?”

“You said you’d still be able to hold a pen. Why are you writing longhand?”

“I like writing longhand.”

“Uh huh.”

Sam shrugs. “Sometimes I can’t get the words to come out right when I’m typing.”

“What are you working on?”

Sam sighs as though every piece of the architecture of his chest has suddenly become inexpressibly heavier. “Just some remarks.”

“Go home, Sam.”

“No, I’m just gonna finish these.”

“You know, I think the next few days are one of those occasions — the only occasion — when if we didn’t turn up to work no one would actually mind. You have a staff and, I’m pretty sure, vacation entitlement. Go home, get some sleep.”

“I’m still excited from the thing, you know.”

“Yeah, you look really excited, with one hand turning to ice.”

“I express my excitement differently.”

“Freakishly,” Toby says, not quite under his breath.

“You want someone to eat pie with or not?”

Toby exhales, rolls his eyes. “Okay.”

They finished the speech three days ago, about half an hour before the President delivered it. And about three hours after that they used the couch in Toby’s office for a purpose its designer and manufacturers probably didn’t have in mind, and that’s why things are a little awkward, the way the it can be when they’re the only people left in the office and there’s nothing but a couple of slices of pie separating their two pairs of hands. Toby is aware that the absence of clear rules about this kind of thing, preferably presented to you on your eighteenth birthday in a stain- and waterproof book which is small enough to fit in the inside pocket of a fashionable jacket, makes Sam uncomfortable. Or is one of the things that is making Sam uncomfortable. He is aware that there are other things too.

They do have rules, between themselves. But not the kind of rules which are written down, or really ever expressed at all.

Which is, Toby can only suppose, the reason why Sam is seeking to prolong the period of impossible exhaustion the two of them have been in for the last month. But still staying late in the office next to his own, needlessly writing remarks and offering his services as a pie eating companion.

This kind of thing, Toby wants to say to him, is the reason I’m divorced.

Well, maybe you shouldn’t have kissed me, Toby, is what he would say back.

It is all so unbearably like the kind of sex he had with Andrea just before the divorce — or unbearably like the way they would sit on the couch and have not the blindest clue what to say to each other without resorting to the kind of cliché both of them were too proud to use.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have kissed you. But maybe you shouldn’t have mooned over me for the last three goddamn years, Sam.

That’s not fair, Toby.

Fine. Maybe it’s not. 

I mean, I’m supposed to control my feelings but you’re not required to control your actions? That’s a good example to follow. Would you be saying the same thing to me if I were a woman you’d just — 

Okay, okay! I apologise unreservedly for giving you exactly what you wanted.

Fuck you, Toby.

You see? I don’t even need to have the actual conversation to know where it ends up. For fuck’s sake.

“How long can you keep your hand in the ice water?” Toby asks, into the silent room.

Sam appears to wake up. “Huh?”

“How long does WebMD recommend keeping your hand in the ice water for?”

“I don’t know, about ten minutes?”

“What happens if you leave it in there for longer?”

“Frostbite, possibly?”

“Could be interesting.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Just an idea.”

Sam stares at him. Toby stares back, for a few seconds.

“We’re out of pie now,” he says.

*

Sex after the State of the Union (which is apparently a tradition now, or something; a standing date at which their ids finally get to say fuck you to their superegos) is an exercise in mime and mesmer. Neither of them have by this point in the calendar any reserves of the kind of things (reason, dispassion, the ability to construct a sentence indicating a negative response to the question 'so how about taking all this off my hands') that would keep them from doing something more sensible, like sleeping, or dying. 

Transparent hands and colourless eyes. Both of them feel like this though neither of them look any different, or not to other people, but Toby knows that Sam can gauge with minute to minute accuracy the progress of his exhaustion, little lifts and staggering falls and the way he dreams the script of his life as it has been for the last two weeks on the fritzed-out screen of the press office teleprompter, including the final line, at six in the morning, just a minute or two before the alarm: get the hell up.

So the night that it is all over is a hard one. The first time they sat on the couch in Toby’s office for two hours before they could do anything — after all the words and the spin and the fear there isn’t anything left but bones and skin, inexpertly patched together. And yes, he started it, that time. He watched himself raise a hand to Sam’s cheek and pass his thumb across Sam’s bottom lip and then kiss him, like nothing at first, like ‘well done’, then more, reaching for more. They were both so tired that they never got it, just the sheen of each other’s sweat on their skin and the taste of stale coffee in their mouths. He supposes that’s why they keep on trying again.

Toby knows that Sam likes to think he makes conscious decisions to do things like contrive to find himself up against the window between their two offices with his fingers curling underneath the buckle of Toby's belt, warming the metal with his skin, but they both know that there were no such decisions, only the final decay of what particles still remained to make up his sense of restraint. Their dicks probably being the only organs of their body not having made a substantial contribution to the last month's work, this could be judged as some kind of reward.

But, as if they have become frictionless, nothing results from the effort Toby makes to push his hands right through Sam’s shoulders and come to the wall on the other side, or Sam’s wrists hard up against the point of Toby’s jaw. They slip away, no purchase, no sale. With numb fingers Toby holds on to Sam’s collar, where it gapes a little against his neck, and pulls him down. They just stand there, with their arms around each other, for a minute, holding on. 

After a little time, Sam tries to kiss him. It’s a college boy classic — mashed lips between teeth and blood suddenly on his tongue — and if he wasn’t incapable, now for another reason beside exhaustion-induced aphasia, Toby would have something to say about technique and has Sam actually not done this again since the last time they did this together? But Sam holds up his hands, holds them up and then makes them join with Toby’s own, with a little smile and a little blood on his lower lip: I surrender.

Sometimes (two out of the three times, by his count) Toby wonders if it counts as masturbation when he slips Sam's cock out of the v of his zipper and tries to make purposeful movements with his own hands before he realises that his own hands ache from the wrists to the fingertips and he no longer has any idea which one of them is talking when sounds which seem to coalesce into syllables appear in the air except that it's got to be Sam because he never can learn to shut up and appreciate the silence when they do this because what sex could they possibly have that wouldn't be improved by a running commentary? Not that he knows this, but that he knows why Sam can't stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth, and not because any of these words give him the clues he needs, but because the last month has been like reading his diary each night, like wearing his clothes and sleeping in his bed; it's not possible for it to be otherwise. But now the little strings that have bound them together, at throat, nipples, hips and ankles, are starting to snap. This is the last thing they do, before they uncouple the telepathy that has stood in for voice and sight and touch, and go back to their allotted squares of space and perception and try to forget, in preparation for the next time.

It says, Toby thinks, afterward, all anyone really needs to know about their relationship that they choose the time when they can feel the least to do the things that ought to feel like something, or why do it at all?

Not that one of the things he wants from his life right now is the kind of relationship they would end up with if communication in any form other than highly stylised speeches and bordering-on-frantic illicit fucks were a forté for either of them. Scratching that particular itch would not be a good idea, for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the fact that they both have high profile jobs working for the President of the fucking United States and who wants _that_ leaked to the New York Times, notwithstanding the poll boost with gays in San Francisco.

It is just the way he knows that Sam would think about it, for thirty seconds he would think about it before he understood that no, no way, not a chance in hell, not if you want a job in this game for the rest of your life because that’s the way it’s gotta be, because we aren’t going to see a homosexual President of this country in our lifetimes, or at least not one where we know about it in advance.

But he would think about it first.

Toby himself has been thinking about it since the first time they did this, with numb hands and cleft tongues, because all the ways that Sam is a romantic on the outside, it seems, are balanced in his own insides, in the black places, down in his guts, where he wonders.

Just think of all the things you could break, he thinks, if we did this when we both had more than one free neurone and you had the full use of your hands.

It is trying to work out ways to say something a little to the left of what he actually means, and ways to avoid saying anything at all. This has never been hard for him, the desire indulge any other response usually the problem, but the tendencies of his mouth, the choices his brain makes and his mouth expresses, when he’s around Sam, lately, are worrying him. Getting caught up in the poetry, in the business of dredging up words from the most shadowy areas of his cerebral cortex, favouring, for the moment, ten words where one or two would suffice, offensively complex sentences, and taking the kind of perverse pleasure in obscure vocabulary that he can only at this stage of the process, until the President reminds him (for the eightieth time) of the average reading age of the American public. That is the kind of stuff he gets drunk on when he isn’t getting drunk. New ways to say old truths, to play the game better than anyone else, for the one time in the year when he can.

Until the spark gets killed by compromise and they all want to climb to the top of the Washington Monument and contemplate their mortality.

But the intoxication stays, the possibility, the wonder of having something at the end of the day that wasn’t there at the beginning of it, and Sam is there, in the corner of his attention, understanding.

It is not so much the things they might say as the possibilities that might erupt into malformed, discoloured butterflies, representing something that is probably hope and the slow death of reason, in their chests. Some fluttering feeling that hadn’t been there the evening before but was when they both woke up, in different beds, having dreamed of something maybe a little better. 

He doesn’t want to become that kind of drunk.

*

Sam’s hands are limp from the wrist and still frozen cold, even after the last ten minutes they’ve spent between Toby’s thighs. Stupidly delicate, small like a woman’s hands, with immaculate nails and no hair over the knuckles, Toby raises them to his mouth, but they melt like snow against his lips, and his tongue dips into the blood in Sam’s wrists. 

“I can’t feel you,” Sam says. He is holding the back of his still freezing cold hands against the underside of Toby’s chin, trying to brush his knuckles over the coarser parts of Toby’s beard in order to get some kind of sensory thrill Toby is ignorant of. Toby is trying to suggest, as subtly as it’s possible to do such a thing, that Sam should quit fooling around and get to the point, but the symbolism brings him up short. Metaphor is, apparently, the last thing to go.

Just think of all the things we could break, he thinks, if either of us were the kind of people who were emotionally available to others.

*

He successfully kept his eyes closed.

Sam tells him stories he has never heard, even though he already knows everything that happens in them. The scenery is a little different, some of the incidental music is rather more stirring (or manipulative) than he remembers, and the little deleted scene at the very end, the one where the hero goes home to carry on drinking on his own, trying to get the taste of sexual dissatisfaction out of his mouth was a surprise, if not a particularly unfamiliar one.

They lie in a strange bed and for a while they try to touch each other, try to kiss, but whether through alcohol or exhaustion, nothing much happens. Sam sleeps, eventually; Toby doesn’t. He spends the night not quite being able to do what he would like to do, which is touch the collar of Sam’s shirt, gaping open in front of him, exposing tender throat between thin wrists, as Sam sleeps, curled up, fists under his chin. 

It is still too close, too near to everything else, and they are still numb with their real lives. Toby can’t touch him, or if he does, can’t feel it. He thinks they are on parallel courses, never to cross. Except that sometimes the lines blur and waver, and then they don’t so much cross as merge, for a day, or a month, and then they part again.

He has known for a while, for a long time, that Sam is in love with him. But he has known other things almost as long: that there is no way for hearts like theirs to make the kind of sacrifices about which speeches are written; they lack the depth and the strength and the bloody foolishness, even Sam does. There won’t be any turning back at the gate to say these things or to make promises that fate will be kind enough to turn true.

So at the end of the week, after the rocks have been thrown, Sam checks out of the hotel and begins to look for a place, and Toby calls Delta for the next flight back to D.C.

And there isn’t any more for seven years.

*

In a different life, which he spent at a desk even further from the Oval Office, Sam was the kid who was always knocking on his door with some excuse to see him that was as awkward as the wringing of his hands. 

Although, of course, he has done the math in his head and realises that Sam would be on the older side, these days, for a blushing undergraduate, even if he himself does fulfil the venerable professor role (probably taking more than a little inspiration from Nabokov along the way) perfectly. However, he feels it would have worked out, or at any rate played out, in the expected way: something about Sam’s stupid hair or even stupider syntax would have got him to admit, with his body if not with his mind, that there was _something_ there that it was necessary to address through the medium of casual sex. And then getting caught somehow, getting careless, or reckless, or angry, and getting thrown out of his life. (He doesn’t know whether to be depressed or perversely proud of his certainty that all his parallel selves have the same trouble with keeping a job.) And losing the kid, always losing the kid, somehow.

But he was always there, for a while at least. One of those ten other guys.

In the life they have, however, he has a desk a pretty goddamn long way away from the present incumbent, and Sam has a Farmer Joe complex which he is working on somewhere out here, where the skies are big and blue and uncluttered by things like airplanes and telephone masts.

Sam invited him to come stay — look around the place, maybe you won’t find it as ridiculous as you think, maybe you’ll even discover that you like the taste of clean air, Toby, you never know. Toby demurred for as long as he could be certain that he was keeping the longing out of his voice, during the conversations they have now, over the phone; short nights that he passes on the phone with Sam, for no reason other than that they can, now. His current theory is that they are using each other to get rid of the words, a kind of bloodletting, the excess humours running down their wrists every night. He doesn’t know if Sam has much time for writing in between herding cattle and learning how not to drive a tractor into the side of his house, and he hasn’t asked, but he suspects that Sam is as dry as he is himself. Why else would they be pouring out the words to each other, three or four nights out of seven?

So he agreed to come, out of curiosity as much as the other thing. He brings a change of clothes, some Jack Daniels and three blank legal pads and a box of pens: always pack for every eventuality.

He gets to Sam’s … ranch? ‘ranch’ would probably describe it best, at just before midnight. Combinations of missed flights and Satré-inspired airport waiting lounges, his luggage on its way to Bermuda without him, and a woman sitting beside him with an angry cat in a carrying cage to whom he suddenly became violently allergic; all the usual cliches combined to make the flight from New York somewhat less than peaceful. So really he’s just pleased to have ended up somewhere that has a roof. He wasn’t honestly sure if there would be one or if he’d arrive at the mile-long driveway and be greeted by the distant sight of Mister S. Seaborn, late of Orange County, CA, attempting to shingle his own roof. He had wondered if he should bring bandages, hydrogen peroxide, and brown paper to repair the resulting catastrophe, but at the last minute decided to give Sam the benefit of the doubt. Cleaning up after his kids for the last few years has taught him a lot of things, but chief among them is not that fathers need to be on hand to gather the broken bones into a neat pile, but that the children need to make their own mistakes. He always kinda enjoyed watching Sam’s.

The path up to the door is a scratch of discoloured earth, packed tight by feet, or just possibly hooves. Sheds behind the main house, stables, and fields that are empty — after all, how many cows can one lawyer from California really be responsible for, all on his own. And as he gets closer to the main house, the inevitable rocking chair on the porch, and the inevitable body sitting in it. Toby is slightly surprised that there isn’t any smoke rising to the rafters of the house from the pipe that isn’t in his mouth.

He raises a hand (the one with the less heavy bag in it) and makes a rudimentary wave.

“Sam.”

“Hey! You made it!”

Stupid: hair too long and tee too white, his lips are paler than they should be, or maybe it’s that his skin is too tan. His eyes are fixed on the distance, on a point just over Toby’s shoulder.

“I made it,” Toby says, accepting but not really returning the hug Sam pulls him into; too many bags in his hands, among other things.

“Hey, man. It’s good to see you.”

“I like your … fields.”

“The beef cattle, or other livestock of the rancher’s choice, are actually optional, Toby, so just save up that speech about how I’m a failure as a farmer as you all knew I would be for later, when there’s actual evidence.”

“The cows are optional?”

“Yeah, they told me I didn’t even have to pass the ranching exam before they sold me the freehold.”

“They made an exception.”

“Well, I had some special circumstances.”

“Uh huh?”

“My father’s money.”

“Ah.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m encouraged that you haven’t, you know, become a Communist or anything like that. Fresh air can lead to that kind of thing, you know.”

“That’s a whole other exam.”

“I suppose so.”

“Are you coming inside?”

“Yeah.”

It seems smaller on the inside, wood floors and low lights that make Toby have to reach for his glasses if he wants to read anything more complicated than the back of a cereal packet, but it suits Sam. He wears old sweatshirts and jeans all the time now, instead of just on the Sundays that he shouldn’t be spending in the office and, somehow, that makes it easier. Toby is able to pull the collar of a ragged old sweater between finger and thumb more readily than he was able to negotiate the sharpness of those bright white shirts. The shadows of the house pull down on his face, at the corners of his mouth, and though they make him look older, Toby thinks they make him more beautiful. 

Sam’s bed is generous. They share it better than he thought they would.

*

“So,” Sam says, later, with the air of one trying to impart a secret with the minimum of fuss, “I’m … I’m writing this thing.”

Toby refuses to let out the breath of surprise he feels.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’ll laugh, it’s stupid.”

Toby gives the lightest of shrugs. “Try me.”

“I’m having these dreams. About the house. About the land, really, I suppose. I don’t know if you saw it when you came in, but there’s a path out back, it goes up with the hill. It becomes a deadfall, if you follow it up.”

“Okay.”

“At night, sometimes, I can hear …”

“What?”

“Did you ever see that guy in Central Park who played a saw? A real old ripsaw, with a whippy blade? An old guy.” 

“No,” Toby says, frowning.

“He used to make the blade vibrate in his hands, sometimes he would try to play it with a violin bow, but usually he’d just sit there with it between his legs and sort of wiggle it. It made this … this noise that —”

“Sam —”

“It went right to your teeth, made you feel like someone had attached a pair of copper wires to your balls, ready for the electric current.”

“That’s what you can hear outside the house?”

“Something like that. That’s the nearest thing I can think of. I think the wind needs to be coming from the right direction — don’t ask me which one because the hell should I know.”

Toby smiles. “Okay.”

“It’s just … oh, I don’t know.”

“Are you telling me a haunted house story, Sam?”

“Yeah. I am the new Shirley Jackson.”

“It’s a new place. You haven’t gotten used to it yet. And god knows you’re far enough away from anything that could reasonably be called civilisation.”

Sam sighs and shifts in the bed.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m writing out the dreams, I guess. Maybe I only hear it in them, I don’t know. No one to corroborate, after all.”

“No,” Toby says, quietly.

“It’s a crossing place, I think.”

“What is?”

“The thing that makes the sound, the rip in the sky, in the hill. You could walk through it, if you wanted to, I think. I almost have.”

“In the dreams?”

“I — yeah. A few times.”

“What’s on the other side?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wait and see?”

Sam smiles, then presses a kiss against Toby’s shoulder. 

“I’ll let you know in the morning, I guess.”

*

So close your eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> The final section takes a somewhat left-at-the-traffic-lights plot twist. This is to be resolved (or at least explained) in the next kink_bingo fic in this set.
> 
> We're shooting for a fusion with Stephen King's _Dark Tower_ books. Eventually. (Which, if you've read _Wizard and Glass_ , you'll already have realised.)


End file.
